A Design System That Survives an Accessibility Audit
In govtech, a design system isn't a nicety for designers — it's risk management your engineering org can bank on. When WCAG conformance is a legal requirement rather than a stretch goal, you cannot afford to relitigate contrast ratios, focus states, and keyboard traps on every screen. So I build accessibility into the component layer itself: an accessible button, field, and modal that ship correct-by-default, so a developer can't easily make them non-conformant. That moves compliance left, out of QA firefighting and into the primitives. For an R&D leader, the payoff is throughput. Tokens for color, spacing, and type mean a citizen-facing service and an internal caseworker tool stay coherent without a coordination tax. It also de-risks i18n — components built for RTL, long German compounds, and dynamic text scaling from day one don't get re-engineered per locale. I keep the system deliberately mature and un-flashy: documented states, versioned changes, deprecation notices. The goal is a foundation that a new engineer can adopt in a sprint and that survives external scrutiny, audits, and the next administration's roadmap — not a library that looks impressive in a demo and fractures under real public load.
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Making complicated into easy for users.
Senior product designer with a decade of work across complex systems - financial risk platforms, legal operations, healthcare apps, manufacturing tooling and insurance portals. The common thread is depth: products where the data is rich, the users are expert, and the interface has to disappear into the work.